Circumference

Superfreakonomics

I won’t add to the angry chorus here, but its worth noting that the science blogopshere has gone ballistic over some pretty egregious errors in the new Dubner and Levitt sure-to-be-a-bestseller, Superfreakonomics. Their chapters on climate change sound pretty off (contrarian for contrarianism’s sake), and Joe Rommhas been leading the charge at ClimateProgress, systematically tearing the offending chapters apart, with Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias chiming in over the color of solar panels and geoengineering:

And I definitely don’t think people should misinform their readers by saying that the global cooling warnings of the 1970s were like the global wqrming warnings of today, or that the “climate agnostics” have a point because human activity contributes only 2% of the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or that particulates worldwide have been going down over the past several decades, or that trees are a net source of global warming, or that the world has been cooling over the past several years, that Nathan Myhrvold has thought more about ecological disaster scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer, or that coal is so cheap that it is “economic suicide” to move away from it as an energy source.

No such thing as bad press? It doesn’t really make a difference, these guys will still sell a gazillion books and smother the media for the next month, but it’s hard to imagine the methodical bludgeoning of their books by all these talkative scientists, political analysts, and economists is going to help.